


Maybe Now Would Be a Good Time to Stop Talking

by pagination



Series: Words are Hard [3]
Category: The Avengers (Marvel) - All Media Types
Genre: Clint is an utter failure at being a SECRET agent, Friendship, M/M, Secret Identity, The Ten Rings (Marvel), a nod to Leverage just because I can
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-02-20
Updated: 2018-02-20
Packaged: 2019-03-21 00:57:38
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,007
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13729728
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pagination/pseuds/pagination
Summary: Phil's civilian friends love Clint. They love Phil-and-Clint. But most of all, they love Phil: their ex-Army, bravely bisexual, establishment-bucking, sewage treatment-passionate, no longer lonely friend.So of course Clint f***s it all up.





	Maybe Now Would Be a Good Time to Stop Talking

**Author's Note:**

> Look what I found saved on Tumblr! I've got an ending somewhere in my Scrivener backup. I should really dig that up.
> 
> This makes waaaaaaay more sense if you read the first story in the series. Maybe. I dunno. 'Sense' is something I stopped subscribing to around the same time I graduated to solid foods.

So it turns out that Phil’s civilian friends are . . . cool.

Well. Maybe not cool. They’re complete dorks. But Clint should’ve remembered that Phil’s superpower was picking people. Phil wouldn’t have picked friends who were crazed assholes with sado-masochistic tendencies. Jasper already holds that position.

“So, I’m supposed to give you a shovel talk,” Richard tells Clint at the cafe, early on in his new relationship with Phil. The program for the day is a light brunch with Phil’s friends, followed by a visit to a farmer’s market like normal people. Clint’s feeling so completely out of his depth, he had to put on an old undercover op personality just to make himself show up.

Clint looks across the table to where Phil is chatting with—is it Kathleen? Katherine? Something that starts with K—and then looks back at Richard.

“Shovel talk?” Clint echoes.

“Uh,” Richard says.

Richard is the guy Clint used to think of as The Linebacker, which it turns out wasn’t that far off the mark. Richard’s actually an ex-NCAA power forward who now runs a successful food co-op in Manhattan. In between dealing with foodies and farmers, he volunteers at a homeless shelter for special needs kids, and walks dogs for his disabled neighbors. Clint would have known all of this already if he’d bothered to look at the jackets Jasper had put together on Phil’s friends, instead of just unilaterally disliking them all on principle.

More to the point though, like a lot of big guys, Richard has always gotten by on his size to avoid trouble. Which is how he likes it. The guy’s a domesticated Welsh Corgi packaged as a junkyard Rottweiler.

Clint just eyes him. Richard shuffles his utensils around and looks embarrassed.

“We—“ Richard indicates the others at the table, “—talked and decided. I mean. We’re really happy you and Phil are together. You have no idea. He’s been lonely, you know? But, like. You hurt Phil, I hurt you—“

“Dude,” Clint says.

“Jesus, I _know_ ,” Richard says despairingly. “But I’ll do my best to punch your nose in!”

“Do you even know how to throw a punch?”

“Yes!”

Clint eyes him again.

Richard droops. “No.” Then he looks determined. “But there’s videos on Youtube.”

Later at the farmer’s market, Bridget—whose make-up practices once made him dub her 'Fifth Element'—corners Clint by some heritage tomatoes and does a Take Two on the shovel talk.

“Treat him like he’s a fucking Fabergé egg,” Bridget says, poking Clint in the chest with one perfectly manicured finger, “or I will reach down your throat and rip your scrotum off _from the inside_.”

She’s a corporate lawyer—the one responsible for setting Phil up with that jackass Harvard—who does pro-bono on the side for domestic abuse victims. Her version of the shovel talk is a lot more intimidating. She’s got a lot of rage.

“I know the Black Widow,” Clint says, in the feeble hope it’ll make Bridget back off if he plays the female solidarity card.

“Then you know not to mess with a motivated woman,” Bridget says.

Christ, the women in his life. Clint nods meekly, and hopes that’s that.

“Here’s the deal though,” Bridget says, turning down the overt menace a notch. “Phil’s a good guy. The very best guy I know. He deserves to be treated like he’s the most important person in your life, you got that? Because you may be this big shot superhero, savior of New York—thanks for your service by the way—“

Clint mumbles.

“—But you will never meet anyone better than Phil Coulson. And if you fuck this up, you will regret it for the rest of your life.”

“I know,” Clint says with complete sincerity.

“Because I will chop off your dick, put it through my pasta maker, cover it in alfredo sauce, and _feed it to you_. Got that?”

“So, like, your friends are really protective,” Clint tells Phil, when he finally makes it through the obstructive barrier of Phil’s friends to find Phil himself.

Phil holds up a mango. “Does that feel soft to you?” he asks, and then says unkindly when Clint opens his mouth, “No pick-up lines.”

Clint closes his mouth.

“And I find it ironic that you’re accusing my friends of being protective, considering you practically had a nervous breakdown when I stubbed my toe last week,” Phil adds, peering at Clint through heavy-rimmed black glasses.

Clint just looks at him. Phil stubbed his toe on car bomb with a tilt fuse that they’d discovered was defective _after_ he’d yanked it out of a French tour bus. Clint thinks he was being completely reasonable about getting upset—but that is so not the point because. Those _glasses._ “I want to fuck you so badly right now,” he says helplessly.

“Ah,” Phil says. “This must be romance.”

“How soft _are_ those mangos? Can we just buy the entire stand and use them as a mattress or something?” And Phil’s rule about pick-up lines in public notwithstanding, he tries, “If you like mangos, can I interest you in some low-hanging—“

“ _No_ ,” Phil says, and turns away as Richard comes bouncing up, burbling happily about heirloom tomatoes. But there’s a crinkle in the corner of Phil’s eyes, so Clint puts a pin in the thought of wrestling with Phil on a bed of squishy produce, and obligingly weighs in on Caspian Pinks and canning.

The mango seller makes bank out of Clint, anyway.

So Phil’s friends are nice. Barring Sophie the British actress, who was absorbed by the group when she dated Kurt the cop for, like, half a second, before they mutually friend zoned each other, they’ve all known Phil since college days. And barring the fact they seriously think Phil’s working as an inspector for New York City Department of Environmental Protection, every single one of them is hella smart. To be fair to them, Phil’s a professional troll, and goes off on exhaustive and expert rants about New York’s sewage treatment flaws at the drop of a hat. His friends get glassy-eyed whenever this happens. Clint, who for fifteen years managed to ignore how Phil’s covert ops competence was a Pavlovian trigger for his dick, just props his head in his hands and _bathes_ in Phil’s righteous indignation.

“You really find this interesting?” Sophie asks him one night over Richard’s vegetarian lasagna, Chianti, and the Combined Sewer Overflow system. Phil’s over by the stereo, waging a one-man war against the Coney Island Waste Water Treatment Plant.

“Raw sewage spilling over into the harbor is serious business,” Clint says earnestly. “Who knows what’ll mutate out there and eat our sushi supplies? Won’t anybody think of the fishies?”

“ _Darling_. You’re too good to be real. You realize that, don’t you?”

“You know you’re eye-fucking him right now?” Bridget asks him.

“If you guys would just leave, I’d use more than my eyes,” Clint says in all seriousness.

Every woman in the room goes, _Awwwwwww_! As far as Clint can tell, it’s almost impossible to disgust them on the subject of Phil-and-Clint-together. Phil wasn’t kidding when he said they were almost _too_ supportive. Three months into the relationship, Bridget and Kathleen are offering to kick people in the balls if they wanted to adopt and ran into any barriers because of quote-unquote, “officially sanctioned homophobic dicks,” while Richard is eagerly trying to get Phil and Clint to record a video for It Gets Better.

In fact, between those three, Kurt’s unabashed fanboying of the Avengers, Sophie and her enthusiasm for planning their hypothetical wedding, and Lacey-the-soccer-mom-slash-internet-microfinance-for-third-world-countries-CEO’s excited planning of the equally hypothetical honeymoon, Clint has never felt so supported and welcomed into a relationship in his entire life. They love Clint. They love Phil-and-Clint. But most of all, they love Phil: their ex-Army, bravely bisexual, establishment-bucking, sewage treatment-passionate, no longer lonely friend.

So of course Clint fucks it all up.

 

*

 

“This,” Bridget says, “is bullshit.”

They’re on the twenty-second floor of the Lloyd, Parker, and Howell Tower in Manhattan, corporate lawyers extraordinaire, Bridget’s employers. It’s an hour after midnight on the fifth of July, and Bridget is stuck waiting for an important phone conference with Japan. Since Phil’s civilian friends are nothing if not supportive to each other in their times of woe (especially when being supportive gives you some of the best seats in the city for fireworks) the entire gang of them is parked in a conference room, eating cold Chinese and streaming weird Japanese obstacle course shows, in honor of the occasion.

It’s Saturday night. Apparently corporate lawyers, who charge by the hour, and the Japanese, who have a seven-day work week, don’t really give a fuck about patriotism.

Unfortunately, neither do terrorists.

The lights go out first. This prompts more complaints than alarm. The heat wave that’s rolled through the city in the last few weeks has resulted in a few outages. ConEd is usually quick to get it back on. Since that puts paid to the wireless though, they occupy themselves with playing rolled-up napkin basketball with the take-out containers under the red emergency lighting.

And then Phil’s phone lights up.

It’s SHIELD. Clint recognizes the coded caller ID on the screen before Phil answers. Phil says, “Hey,” and, “Really?” and, “That’s inconvenient,” and then, fatally, “This would’ve been useful to know about six hours ago.” He’s practically affable, but the agent on the other side of the call is probably shriveling up into fetal position right about now.

The rest of the gang is still heckling Richard, whose NCAA experience is apparently no match for the 3-point shooting talents of a professional social worker.

Clint leans over. “Problem?” he whispers, under the pretext of nuzzling Phil’s free ear.

“Mm,” Phil says, detaching himself briefly from the phone to nuzzle back. “Ten Rings just hit the building.”

“Whyyyyyy?” Clint whines, quickly doing a mental inventory. He’s packing, obviously, and so is Phil. He doesn’t have his bow because why the fuck would he bring it to dinner with civilians. He’s also not wearing armor. Neither is Phil. He could lead them away if they’re here for him. If they’re here for Phil, he will disembowel the fuckers. It’s a plan. “Which of us is the target?”

Phil’s mouth twitches. “Apparently, their target is the servers here. Something about a case the lawyers are preparing,” Clint can faintly hear the apologetic warble of the agent on the line. A pained crease appears between Phil’s eyebrows. “Homeland Security is coordinating a response.”

Oh sweet _Jesus,_ no.

There’s a four-letter word for Clint’s relationship with Homeland Stupidity, whose mandate might be protecting America from terrorism, but whose _hobby_ is pissing Clint off. The red-necked ex-drill sergeant from the CIA who once tried to recruit Clint is now a director in the DHS, and it’s only by the grace of the Chitauri and the widely-publicized Battle of Manhattan that Clint finally got off of the No Fly lists for suspicion of being a jackass. At worst, it was a minor inconvenience; Clint never flew under his own name. It was the principle of the thing that got to him, frankly.

That, and the way DHS spent six years trying to ruin every op Clint was part of. They even showed up to try to collect Thor’s hammer in Puente Antiguo. Watching Phil politely eviscerate them should’ve made Clint realize just how big his hard-on for Phil right then and there, but nobody’s ever held him up as a model for self-awareness.

Making DHS look stupid would make this the perfect ending to a perfect night. A date, fireworks, Chinese food with friends, terrorist attack, maybe sex afterwards and ice cream for dessert.

What more could any redneck ex-carnie superhero ask for?

“We could secure the floor and stay put,” Phil murmurs.

“We could cut the Ten Rings’ dicks off, and then shove them up DHS’s asshole,” Clint whispers.

“Or we could secure the floor and stay put,” Phil says again.

Clint nuzzles his earlobe and then catches it gently between his teeth. Phil shivers. Clint immediately gets half-hard at the reminder he makes Phil Coulson _shiver_. “C’mon,” he coaxes, letting his voice drop low into a purr. Phil shivers again. Piously, Clint murmurs on a ghost of a breath, “For _America_.”

Phil rolls his eyes, but Clint knows he’s won. A balled-up napkin bops Clint in the temple. “Get a room!” Kurt hollers good-naturedly.

“I have the keys to my boss’s office,” Bridget invites. “It’s right next door, soundproofed, and has a great sofa. Leather, so it wipes down easy.”

“Is that personal experience talking?” Sophie asks, interested.

“I neither confirm nor deny. But it’s got great lumbar support. And I hate my boss. He hits on the interns.”

“Sold,” Phil says, and accepts the tossed keys.

Clint trails after Phil, their fingers tangled together. He grins over his shoulder at the gang as he goes—even after all this time they’re a bit starry-eyed as they cheer Phil on, the kind of doting look brought out by kittens and baby sloths. Once Phil has them in the corner office though, they drop the lovey-dovey act.

Phil gets back on the phone to the agent, who’s sent to get Jasper out of bed as punishment for being the bearer of bad tidings. Clint does a fuller inventory of what they have to work with. Between him and Phil, they have eight full clips and six guns. “We could call Tony in,” he points out. “Just say the words ’Ten Rings’ and he’ll be here with repulsers blazing.”

“I’d like to finish the night by _not_ burning down Bridget’s livelihood, thank you,” Phil says dryly. “You’re absolutely not going after them yourself. You don’t have any intel, much less any idea where they’re headed.”

Clint sniffs, and heads back to the conference room while Jasper gets on the phone and starts shouting at Phil for having fun without him. By the time he gets back, things have calmed down a little.

“Eleventh floor,” Clint informs.

Phil eyes him.

“The _feng shui_ of electronics was messing with my ability to perform,” Clint says self-righteously. “The servers are on the eleventh floor, so we have to align the sofa east-west to make sure good luck and spiritual potency don’t, uh, _flow_ out of the room.”

Phil sighs.

“Sophie might be giving us copy of a lovely 9th century Chinese bell as a _darling, you should move in with your same-gendered lover_ present, by the way,” Clint adds. “It’ll be good for our _qi_. Her words, not mine.”

“I suppose that means I should warn the National Palace Museum to check their inventory,” Phil says, sounding resigned.

“What?”

Phil shakes his head. “Jasper’s sending a squad, but there’s going to be the usual jurisdictional squabbles. He’s pulling the security feeds right now. They’ve already killed the security guards,” he adds more soberly. “The initial count is fifteen, heavily armed. DHS doesn’t _think_ they have any explosives.”

“Oh good,” Clint says.

“Rogers is on his way with Wilson,” Phil adds.

“Better.”

“They’re bringing your bow and armor for us.”

Clint beams. “Best.”

They draw the blinds on the office and leave the lights on, then sneak past the conference room to take the stairwell up. The roof door’s got an emergency alarm on it, but the circuit’s been turned off. That’s the nice thing about terrorists: they take care of those kinds of details for you.

Sam’s just touching down with Steve when they get there, both of them dressed to kill in civvies, and looking resigned and happy, respectively.

“Man, we were having a great evening, and then _this_ ,” Sam says. “I hate terrorists.”

“Sam took me clubbing,” Steve explains, looking like he doesn’t agree with Sam’s assessment of clubbing as ‘a great evening.’ He tosses Clint a pack that turns out to contain his bow, his quiver, and body armor for them both. Also, ear-coms. And guns. Lots of guns. Steve brings the best presents.

“You take your wings and your shield clubbing?” Clint asks.

“SHIELD brought them,” Steve says.

Sam complains, “We were having _fun_.”

“Stopping terrorists is fun for everyone,” Steve says earnestly.

“No, man. _Disneyworld_ is fun for everyone. Terrorists are— I don’t know what terrorists are.”

Steve looks sad, but determined. Basically, his version of Clint’s resting bitch face. “The Ten Rings is affiliated with Hydra.”

Sam covers his eyes with a hand. “Aaaaaaaaaaaaand here we go.”

They have no way of knowing how many civilians are in the building, barring the gang in the conference room. Pulling the fire alarm is out of the question; the Ten Rings are in the stairwells and have a history of taking hostages with messy results, not to mention the last thing they need is for all the security doors to get unlocked with the alarm. Besides which, the fire alarm lines have probably also been cut.

Clint thinks they they should go floor by floor and bring the civilians to the roof. Phil agrees. Clint thinks they should set up a zip line between the building and the Rutger Tower next door and evacuate civilians in the coolest way possible.

The corners of Phil’s eyes crinkle. But he still says no.

“They do it in Mr. and Mrs. Smith,” Clint accuses.

“I saw that movie,” Sam says. “Those were trained assassins, man.”

“Building full of _corporate_ _lawyers_ ,” Clint says, pointing down. “One of them threatened to put my dick through a pasta maker and feed it to me with alfredo sauce. Explain to me the difference.”

Phil says mildly, “ _Pesto calabrese_ is the recommended sauce for shredded dick.”

Sam backhands Steve on the chest. “I have 100% more cannibals in my life because of you.”

“Sorry,” Steve says. He sounds sincerely remorseful.

Clint sulks. “You won’t let me use pick-up jokes in public, you won’t have sex with me in farmer’s markets, you won’t let me go after the terrorists, you won’t let me make lawyers zip-line across Manhattan—“

“You may have one pick-up line,” Phil concedes, as he buttons up over his body armor.

Phil really does love him. Clint brightens. “If the Ten Rings kill my dick, can I bury it in your ass?”

Steve turns red. Sam looks pained. “That’s just _wrong_ , man.”

“Containment and clean-up is the DHS’s problem,” Phil says without a blink, chambering a round in the P99 Steve brought him.

“Oh jeez,” says Sam. “Those jokers are here?”

“You’re my favorite,” Clint exults, and fist-bumps him.

Steve and Clint handle the sweeps. They’ve got Avengers cred backing them, so they’ll have less effort trying to evacuate people than some stranger in a button-down and khakis. Phil takes point on the stairwell, clearing down each level below while they sweep the one above. They make it floors from thirty to twenty-six without a problem or spying a single civilian.

Of course shit goes pear-shaped on floor twenty-three, when a trio of Ten Rings assholes pop onto the stairwell and start shooting.

Steve doesn’t hesitate. He’s just coming out of the security door on the twenty-sixth when the first bullets fly. He’s got the shield in front of him and is jumping down the center of the stairwell like a patriotic yoyo. Bullets crack off the shield. Clint’s right behind him, taking the stairs an entire flight at a time. Phil though, he’s already down the next floor. By the time Clint catches sight of him two stories down and across the gap, Phil’s hand-to-hand with one terrorist, aiming to disarm rather than kill. Meanwhile, Steve’s got one down with prejudice and is efficiently dismantling the second.

It’s all in hand, and Clint’s just thinking about whether to just shoot the one Phil’s hammering, or lean against the wall and admire his boyfriend’s moves, when he catches sight of another couple of black-clad Ten Rings hustling up the stairs.

He’s got his two shots off before he even thinks about it. An arrow through the neck of one, easy. The guy makes it up another couple of steps, Dead Man Stairmastering, before collapsing into a crumpled heap on the stairwell. An arrow through the second one’s thigh makes him bounce off the back wall and ricochet off towards the other side, screaming.

Aw, free-falling terrorist, _no_.

Clint’s got a grapple on the string before the body even finishes tipping over the railing into empty air. Easy shot. He gets him through the chest and grabs at the line to keep it from falling all twenty-whatever stories to warn the ground floor squad—

Except there’s no line.

He looks down at his empty hand. What the fuck.

He has a split-second to look after the falling body and think about the automatic adjustments he had to make for the arrow’s balance. His mouth moves before his brain does. For once, it does the right thing. “Fire in the hold!”

Some instincts are hard-coded for a reason. Phil drops, just below his opponent’s lunge with a knife. Steve literally leaps _over_ the heads of his guy and Phil’s, to cover them both with the shield. Clint just drops to a crouch, covers his ears, and thinks about kissing his ass good-bye.

The stairwell explodes.

Whatever Tony packed in that arrowhead, it wasn’t done with body disposal in mind. The entire stairwell shakes as fire and heat balloons up the stairwell, converting it into a chimney. The pressure wave rips at the bolts holding the metal stairwell in place; Clint curses as concrete blocks crack and crumble overhead, sending chunks clattering onto the metal and off into empty air.

Clint’s ears are ringing in time with the headache that’s picked up its keys and moved in. He peels an eye open at the distant sound of someone coughing. Sam’s quietly shouting in his com.

“Status,” Phil rasps on the line.

“Clear,” he wheezes. Steve seconds him. So all three of them are alive.

Yay.

“This is the quiver Tony was messing with,” Clint says hoarsely, before Phil can start yelling. “That was supposed to be a grapple.”

Sam says a distinct, “ _Fuck_ ,” in his ear. “Yeah, this is so much better than clubbing.”

Metal shrieks. The stairs under Clint’s feet are starting to shake in a way that isn’t filling him with confidence. Pieces of the building are still tumbling down the stairwell, none of them large enough to cause serious injury, but big enough to hurt like fuck when they hit him on the shoulder.

“We need to get out of the stairwell,” Phil says, sounding breathless. Clint rises cautiously and spies Phil being supported by Steve. Phil’s hurt. Clint’s stomach drops. “Hawkeye.”

“Yeah,” Clint says. He’s not on the side with the doors. Steve dips out of sight, the bash of his shield against metal signaling that he’s getting through the fire door the easy way. Clint waits just long enough for him and Phil to disappear from their landing, dragging one of the Ten Rings dopes behind them, before he vaults the railing to jump the two stories down. He snags the twenty-second floor railing on the way down, slams hard against the side of the landing, and pulls himself up and over.

Steve’s holding the door open for him. Phil’s braced against a wall, streaked with smoke and holding grimly to his bloody arm. Two of the Ten Rings guys they were fighting are dead on the platform. The third is zip-tied and unconscious. Steve’s dragged him through the door into the expensive hallway beyond, so at least Clint hasn’t fucked up all their chances at better intel.

Oh, and Phil’s friends are standing outside the conference room, looking shocked.

Steve lets the door slam shut. Right before it closes, half the stairwell collapses. The door closes on the tortured shriek of metal and a thunderous crash.

Clint meets Bridget’s eyes. They’re starting to narrow in a way that screams _pasta maker_.

“So, this looks bad?” Clint says feebly.


End file.
